Part 21 (1/2)
Disgust, as an emotion exclusive to humans, also helps put distance between us and the rest of nature. It is a crucial component of the civilizing process. Rozin points out that anything that reminds us that we are in fact still animals can elicit feelings of disgust. This includes bodily secretions,* s.e.xuality, and death. But for Rozin it is the third term here that is the most important.
”The prototypical odor of disgust is the odor of decay,” he points out, ”which is the odor of death.” Thus disgust can be understood as a defense against our fear of death, another emotion that happens to be unique to our species Rozin says that people who score high on psychological tests for ”disgust sensitivity” also score high on tests measuring the fear of death.
Putrefaction is repulsive to us because it reminds us of our ultimate fate, which is to have the n.o.ble and intricate form of our bodies disintegrate into a suppurating, stinking puddle of formlessness, then to be returned to the earth as food for the worms. This work of decomposition will be performed by bacteria and fungi, and the method they will deploy will be fermentation. Oddly, it is this process of decomposition that disgusts us, not the final result of that process: Rotting flesh is disgusting, but skeletons are not.
So why should we ever be attracted to the very processes and products that, for the very good reasons Rozin gives, repulse us? Surely this is perverse. Yet if disgust is in fact one of the ways humans draw a line between themselves and the other animals, then to deliberately put ourselves in situations that elicit disgust may allow us to underscore and enforce that distinction. Perhaps we ”enjoy” the experience of disgust for the flattering things the reaction implies about us-the wrinkling of the nose a visible index of our superiority and refinement.
I became curious to know what Stillwaggon would have to say on the subject, and in the middle of my journey through the literature of disgust, I went looking for him online. Something had raised my antennae-didn't smell quite right-when Sister Noella told me he hadn't published. Stillwaggon didn't sound like a man who could keep his views under a bushel basket even if he tried. When I searched his name, I found no books or Web sites, but I did find a Facebook page, and there on its wall a URL. Bingo: In large type the words ”Cheese, s.e.x, Death and Madness” popped up on my screen, above a photo of an ap.r.o.ned man stirring a copper vat of milk, next to a photo of a particularly hideous cheese oozing yellow from its broken crust.*
The Web site, half in French and half in English, was itself an aromatic ferment of truly wild ideas about, well, s.e.x and death and cheese, which Stillwaggon defined as ”nature imperfectly mastered.” This struck me as a pretty good definition for fermentation in general. (If not for the entire human enterprise.) He went on to describe cheese as ”an incarnate Pa.s.sion Play, unfolding in its lifetime (briefer, in general, than our own) all the characteristics of the newborn, of juvenility and adolescence, of maturity and of decrepitude.” Cheese was flesh, heir to all its glories and mortifications. On the home page I clicked on ”Attraction & Repulsion” and found this soaring, overripe, and ungrammatical flight of cheesy exegesis:
”Cheese shares the same ambiguity of attraction/repulsion which marks and characterizes our genital and a.n.a.l zones as pa.s.sage from the scrubbed and well-aired exterior toward the organic, unsurveyed and uncontrolled interior: infernal microcosm fermenting, composting, the seething haven of impersonal microbiota. ...
”In both domains-the cheese and the s.e.x-we are drawn to the limits of our comfort zone. Both zones of experience therefore invite us to exceed our limits, to test, to uncover, to abandon our reserve, to relativize our notions and principles-of limit, of desirable, of good & bad, of attractiveness and hideousness. The direction of this discovery is from pure and simple toward impure and complex, from a formal, cared-for aesthetic toward a formlessness, an aesthetic of abandon and degradation.”
Whew ...
Stillwaggon had single-handedly yanked Dionysus out of the world of wine, where he had been comfortably ensconced for thirty-five hundred years, and brought him into the world of cheese. (Where, surprisingly enough, he seemed very much at home.) Stillwaggon and Sister Noella shared large ambitions for the significance of cheese in human affairs, though I could certainly see why she might not think the world was ready for his writings. Stillwaggon's mad Web site achieved a kind of perverse brilliance, accompanied by a handful of louche cheese photos and the occasional clipping from the French press. (Including one about a French study of human odor that found that men, when ripe, smell more like washed-rind cheese than women, who smell more like sauvignon blanc.) But I found the ”Cheese, s.e.x, Death and Madness” so rhetorically moist and overheated that I soon clicked out of it. And made my way back to Freud, who had never before seemed quite so moderate and sane.
True, Freud had nothing specific to say about cheese, but his thoughts on disgust were illuminating even so. For Freud, disgust is a ”reaction formation” designed to keep us from indulging desires our civilization has sought to repress. We are drawn to what disgusts because it is a cover for precisely what most attracts. Freud points out that children are not in the least disgusted by feces; to the contrary, they're fascinated by them. But they learn to be disgusted as part of their socialization. Disgust thus operates as a kind of deeply internalized taboo against desires civilization needs to repress.
But taboos are always ripe for breaking, especially when they can be broken without doing serious harm, to either the individual or society. A cheese that stinks-of manure, of s.e.x-offers a relatively safe way for us to flirt with forbidden desires. And even a cheese that stinks of death-one that, like a ripe Vacherin, has completely disintegrated into a formless ooze-may offer a perverse sort of pleasure. For, if the final fermentation that awaits us all is too horrible to contemplate, perhaps a little preview of putrefaction on a cheese plate can, like a gothic tale or horror movie, give us the little frisson of pleasure that comes from rehearsing precisely what we most fear.
Freud was surely right to suggest that disgust is a learned response, mediated by culture. Anthropologists have amply doc.u.mented the fact that, although the emotion of disgust is a human universal, the specific things that elicit disgust in one culture don't necessarily disgust people in another. Cheese is the perfect example. Until very recently, most Americans found strong French cheeses repulsive. When Red Hawk was introduced a decade or so ago, there was only a handful of washed-rind cheeses made in America. Claude Levi-Strauss writes that, after the American troops landed in Normandy in 1944, they destroyed several of the dairies where Camembert was made because they reeked-of what the troops a.s.sumed had to be corpses. Oops.
Many Asians regard cheese of any kind as repulsive, and stinky cheeses so disgusting as to be utterly incomprehensible as food. Lest you conclude that people in Asia have more delicate noses than do we in the West, consider a few of the East's own stinking delicacies. The j.a.panese prize natto, the stringy, mucilaginous ferment of soybeans that is strongly redolent of garbage. Fish sauce, used to flavor foods in many Southeast Asian nations, is the liquid secreted by dead fish that have been allowed to rot under the equatorial sun until they lose any hint of form and stink magnificently. The Chinese love their ”stinky tofu,” which is made by steeping blocks of tofu in a very old, black ooze of putrefying vegetable matter. Being far too odiferous to bring indoors, stinky tofu is usually eaten as a street food, though even out in the open air it can stink up an entire city block.
I recently had the opportunity to sample stinky tofu in Shanghai. The stink is unmistakably the stink of putrefaction, and, at least to this nose, is more disgusting than any cheese I've ever encountered. But, then, I am not Asian. (Surprisingly, it tasted pretty good once you got it safely past the nostrils, and I'm convinced the rich menagerie of local bacteria did much to settle a stomach dis...o...b..bulated by travel.) Asians who have tasted a strong cheese like Roquefort will swear that rotted milk is much more disgusting than rotted soybeans, because the animal fats in the cheese coat the mouth, causing the flavors to linger. What makes stinky tofu superior, in their view, is that the taste, which they claim is ”cleaner,” doesn't last long. But what kind of selling point is that, for a food whose taste you supposedly like?
Arguing over which culture has the more disgusting delicacy is never going to be very productive. What's interesting here is that so many cultures seem to have one powerful, smelly food that they prize with as much fervor as other cultures despise it. In some places, that culturally defining food is notable for its pungency rather than its odor-think of hot chilis in Mexico or India. But many, if not most, of these iconic foods-natto, stinky tofu, cheese, fish sauce, sauerkraut, kimchi-get their power from fermentation. And, just as curiously, the devotees of these strong ferments (or spicy foods) frequently take pleasure in the fact that people from other cultures can't easily choke them down. One of the things a food can do for people is to help define them as a group-we are the people who like to eat rotted shark. It could be that the success of this self-definition depends on other people finding the very same food inedible or disgusting. In the same way that disgust can be used to draw lines between humans and other animals, it can also help draw lines between cultures.
Certainly it can take the full force of culture to overcome people's resistance to the odor of rotting plants or the back end of animals in something you're supposed to eat. This is what is meant by an acquired taste. If culture is capable of inspiring disgust, it can also help us overcome it when doing so suits its purposes. Culture is nothing if not powerful, especially when it comes to defining or defending itself.
In South Korea recently, I watched cla.s.ses of kindergarteners marched through a kimchi museum in Seoul, one of two in that city and many more in that country. There were dioramas of women rubbing spice into cabbage leaves, and displays of kimchi urns. The schoolchildren were being gently indoctrinated in the culture of the national dish, learning its history and trying their hand at making it. As a docent explained to me, ”Children are not born loving kimchi.” That is, it is something they have to learn. Why? To become fully Korean. A sweet red strawberry just wouldn't have done the trick. If a food is going to help forge cultural ident.i.ty, it must be an acquired taste, not a universal one. Surely that explains why fermented foods have so often and so reliably played this role.
The taste of fermented foods is the taste of us, and them.
During my first visit to the Abbey of Regina Laudis, Sister Noella invited me to attend the morning ma.s.s. Ma.s.s takes place on a wooded hillside above the abbey in a building that, from the outside, looks like a plain old New England barn, but inside reveals itself as a soaring wooden cathedral, flooded with light. I took a seat way in the back. I could see Sister Noella and Stephanie with the other nuns behind the grille of black bars behind the altar, where a lanky young priest was presiding. Two by two, the nuns in their flowing black habits floated up to a little teller's window in the grille to take communion from Father Ian, taking first the wafer on their tongue and then a sip of wine from his cup.
By now, I subscribed wholeheartedly to Sister Noella's possibly heretical notion that cheese deserved a place alongside wine and bread in the Eucharist. Cheese seemed easily as good a symbol of the body as bread, maybe better: Certainly it offered a sharper, more poignant reminder of the flesh's mortality. ”Everything about cheese reminds us of death,” she had told me. ”The caves in which they age are like crypts; then there are the smells of decomposition.” Though you could also see why the early church fathers might have rejected cheese, as perhaps a little too reminiscent of the flesh in a ritual that was, after all, not just about transformation and death but transcendence too.
As it happened, Father Ian's sermon that morning was on the subject of fermentation. The day's text was the exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees. What was Jesus's att.i.tude to the covenant of the Old Testament? He did not seek simply to reject it, Father Ian said. ”No one who has been drinking old wine desires new,” Jesus tells the Pharisees. Tradition, like an old wine, is too precious to throw out. And yet Christ's gospel did introduce something new and transformative, the result of a process Father Ian likened to fermentation. In the same way that ”fermentation releases energy in the process of breaking down the wheat, grape juice or curds; so Jesus is saying that his interpretation and revelation of the covenant is a life-giving and transformative mediation of the covenant. ...”
I wasn't sure how hard Father Ian wanted to push the a.n.a.logy of Jesus as a fungus breaking down the Old Testament in order to create the New. And if the Old Testament was already such a fine old wine, then why ferment it again? Yet to figure spiritual faith as a kind of fermentation-a transformation of the substrate of nature or everyday life into something infinitely more powerful, meaningful, and symbolic-well, that seemed to me exactly right. It offered us a way, as Father Ian said in closing, ”to transform what is old in us, the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands, into something new.” Just barely, I could make out the silhouette of Sister Noella in the pews beyond him, her wimple nodding slowly up and down.
Ferment III.
Alcohol